Friday, November 25, 2005

I've had email from a friend asking me what "narrative medicine" is, so I offer the above link for a good explanation. Dr. Charon explains:

Gradually, I realized that most all of medicine is deeply saturated with narrative practices, not only in creating therapeutic alliances with patients and instilling reflection in our practices but also generating hypotheses in our science, learning our fabulous tradition of explanations about the human body, teaching students and colleagues what we know about sickness, acting with so-called professionalism toward one another and our patients, and entering into serious discourse with the public about what kind of medicine our culture wants. I invented the term "Narrative Medicine" to connote a medicine practiced with narrative competence and marked with an understanding of these highly complex narrative situations among doctors, patients, colleagues, and the public.

Narrative medicine does not spring from nowhere. Its lineage includes biopsychosocial medicine, primary care, medical humanities, and patient-centered medicine. What narrative medicine offers that the others may not be in a position to offer is a disciplined and deep set of conceptual frameworks -- mostly from literary studies, and especially from narratology -- that give us theoretical means to understand why acts of doctoring are not unlike acts of reading, interpreting, and writing and how such things as reading fiction and writing ordinary narrative prose about our patients help to make us better doctors. By examining medical practices in the light of robust narrative theories, we begin to be able to make new sense of the genres of medicine, the telling situations that obtain, say, at attending rounds, the ethics that bind the teller to the listener in the office, and of the events of illness themselves. It helps us make new sense of all that occurs between doctor and patient, between medicine and its public.

I've come to realize the importance of narrative to nursing, also. In fact, as the essence of nursing is caring-maybe I'd go so far as to say the definition of nursing is caring-narrative saturates our practice, too.

It all starts when I answer the referral line and begin to listen to a story that usually starts with "I have a child and that child is like this".